Employee Career Development

The comeback of company-sponsored get-togethers is providing a year-end boost for the city’s hospitality industry, which was slammed by the recession. Corporate bookings are up significantly from last year at many hotels, restaurants and other venues.

Online, informal and social learning are increasingly part of the corporate training mix; their elements are often blended with traditional classroom sessions to create a recipe for training success. As a result, face-to-face learning has become rarer and is reserved for specialized, highly complex or contextual material.

We are an animation company and work on multiple projects of varied complexities. The individual performance evaluation is done based on similar KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities) defined for specific roles. Our challenge: how to normalize the performance across different projects for individuals with same ratings when evaluating pay hikes/promotions. We will not be able to consider them at the same competency level because their work is of varied complexities.

Despite attention to onboarding and engaging them, we can’t seem to retain our early-career professionals (those with fewer than five years’ seniority). For example, we have implemented engagement interview with management team members, provide a new-hire engagement program, and orientation workshops—yet turnover among young professionals remains unacceptably high. What are we doing wrong? More important, how can we reverse the trend?

Each year our management directs our staffers to write their own evaluations for appraisals. These written evaluations then become the basis for appraisals. Realizing that one size does not fit all companies, we nevertheless want to create some type of standardized format to use for these self-assessments. How should we structure it so we are reasonably sure that the questions generate honest responses from employees? What other pitfalls should we take note of?